There are Right Ways and Wrong Ways

Bruce Lee said:

I don’t fear the man who has 10,000 kicks, I fear the man who has practiced 1 kick 10,000 times.

— Wisdom for the Way

And there is cultural and retail and consumer insanity doing the same thing over and over and over expecting different results, as in doing the same wrong thing over and over, or, following the wrong ways over and over, and expecting different results is, well, sort of insane.

Or that system of thinking, SOPs, the working rule book for this system of extraction, destruction, razing, paving over, polluting, degrading, destroying, developing, and diseasing is what rules the insanity of the systems of oppression.

Imagine that, no, this system, and the underlying cause and effect, effect and cause in an endless back and forth cause drawn by effects. Beach renourishment is this terminology of sanity. Amazing Orwellian PR spinning. That is, taking sand from off the wrack line, offshore, to dump and plow on the beachhead, because, well, seas pull and push, pull and push, and reorient the actual beach architecture. Rising seas, and then, of course, coastal luxuries and development (human) means that the beaches have to have sand and weight and dimension to be a usable beach. Commercial, and now, we figured out that mangroves and wetlands and deltas and sand hold back the big waves of storms.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discovered around 300,000 tires underwater as they were surveying an area to draw sand from for the latest renourishment project.

One generation’s problem is another’s problem sort of solved, insanely, and that sort of solve becomes the next generation’s problem. Or in the case of us, we see the problem sort of solved at age 20 and see the solve/solution becoming a bigger problem.

The tires were likely part of an artificial reef placed by the state in the 1970s or 1980s that have since drifted down the coast. Patricia Smith with the NC Division of Marine Fisheries says there could be more than half-a-million tires along the shoreline even though the practice of using tires for that purpose ended in the 80s.

“Over the years some of these tires have drifted off of the artificial reefs,” said Smith. “Some of them have washed ashore, when they do that we pick them up we get them disposed of properly.”

The tires underwater, however, are too expensive to remove. That means the Army Corps of Engineers working on the project will have to work around them to find enough sand. (Source)

So, hurricanes, and big surge storms, all of that, eroding those beaches. Now, sand is like oil is like gold is like data. Those 500,000 tires are now of a magnitude of 1,000 or more times globally, just dumped, not strategically dumped for “artificially reef building (sic)”.

Yeah, invest in plastics, young man. That solution (sic) that never was but now is the problem on a multiple level scale:

Most folks who work to end our plastic habit focus on the environmental impacts — such as trash, oil use, and manufacturing emissions. All important. EWG looks at it from another angle, too: the plastic pollution inside us. In you. In newborn babies. (Source)

Plastic pollution is an environmental, wildlife, climate, human health, and social justice issue. Hormone distrupter. Brain barrier crosser. Gut killer. Blood leveler. Diabetes and brain fog and, well, what a sane solution, sort of.

The great garbage patch:

How compliant are we stuck in Capitalism, stuck in this western cultural lie of elites – them are better, us — we are dependent upon them – elites. How we in modern civilization draw on acceptance, and seeing us as them, and them as the other.

Here, “I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.”  — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free

Here are the section headings for Mayer’s book,

Section headings from the article discussing Mayer’s book and how relevant it is now — They Thought They Were Free by Joshua Styles.

Overcoming Decency

“Even if many Germans did not harbor anti-Semitic prejudices (at least not initially), the forced separation of Jews and non-Jews created a devastating rift in German society, tearing the social fabric and paving the way for tyranny. In our day, the separation of the masked and unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, has divided populations around the world like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. And the global scale of this separation has perhaps not happened in recorded history.”

 Our Own Lives

 Our Own Fears

 Our Own Troubles

 The Tactics of Tyrants

 The Common Good

“Governments across time have used the “common good” as an excuse to consolidate power and implement authoritarian measures that under normal circumstances would be rejected….Tyrants understand how to exploit our desire to care for others. We must understand their tendency to exploit our good will. Indeed, to understand this tactic and to resist encroachments on liberty is the way to preserve the actual common good. Tragically, many people do not realize that they have been exploited—that their desire to work for the common good has become obedience without question.”

 Endless Distractions

 Science and Education

“‘Trust the science.’ Or so we have been told the past two years. Yet another tactic used by authoritarians across time is the appeal to science and expertise….over the past two years, ‘science’ has meant whatever the public health authorities claim to be true, regardless whether the claims are supported by evidence. In fact, much of this so-called science has proved to be demonstrably false.”

 Suppressing Speech and Encouraging Self-Censorship

 Uncertainty

 Gradually, Then Suddenly

“Think back to March 2020. We should have resisted then. We should not have tolerated stay-at-home orders or various (and even non-sensical) restrictions on local businesses and private life. Governments had already gone too far. And then came the masks, and some said that masks were the hill. Individuals who shared these concerns were derided as fanatics and conspiracy theorists, but they were right.”

 The Power of Non-Violent Resistance

 The Cost of Dissent

 The Cost of Compliance

 The Choice Before Us

 What Will We Choose?

Finally, I’m reading Orion magazine’s summer issue:

Reading, “The Patrescene: When men hold the power, humanity fades” by Amy Irvine.

Yes, this is so true, though today, unfortunately, with Western Culture, warring, the war against children, nature, land, soil, air, water, food, trees, people, we do not have that clear deliniation that we have had over time: “When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.“

SO, without getting into the Military Industrial Complex’s female CEOs and the war drumming by so many women in the EU to send more Ukrainians to the front, to the grinder, and the Hillary and Albright situation, this writer does hit sparks:

Our hands bloodied and bodies bent beneath the weight of an animal ten times our size, a thing we stalked and killed together because together there was nothing we couldn’t do. Things were fairer. We were fed. This is not some romantic revision of our beginnings; it’s in bones and relics and rock art. The earliest shamans were female. Many of the handprints stenciled into the walls of Europe’s famous painted caves are female. The remains of an early big game hunter just unearthed in the Americas are also female. Or maybe the ancient ones thought of these bodies in a less binary way. Maybe the binary is to blame as much as the seed.

The fossil record reveals that, a half million years ago, the brain size of both our African and Eurasian human ancestors burgeoned. This is the longest and arguably most successful era, the time of hunter-gatherers. A time when there was materially more energy for females and their offspring—not only is more food available but females also have equal part in the acquisition and distribution of nutrients and calories. In such a society, maternal and child health are valued and, in turn, the species thrives—so calorie-demanding brains grow bigger. But the stauncher the patriarchy, the higher the death rates of mothers and children. When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.

Yes, I hammer it hard on how insane the people I have worked with and worked for have been, and how traumatized they are, but how traumatizing they become. I have worked in fields that are dominated by women — college English teacher, social work, environmental sustainability, writing, journalism, literary editing. Truly, I have to say that capitalism has that uncanny ability to chronically disease people, both male and female. It is inflammatory, it is dehumanizing, it is violent and dog-eat-dog, and it is based on white supremacy, racism, the ability to steal souls and sell them for a pound of gold. To see the white disease come into a land and steal and subjugate. It is amazing to see how much the world’s native and indigenous people have suffered under that formula of pain.

I expect the Orion piece to be creative, soul crafting, and not always centered in the reality of our politics, geo-politics, and the hell on earth this country has unleashed on the rest of the world. Just being an American or a Brit or Canadian or European unleashes pain from centuries ago, now and into the future.

Here, another piece from the Summer Orion:

The real Age of Dominion would come much later. After the Crusades, in which Christians first unleashed large-scale violence against non-Christians. After the adoption of mercantilist conquest and slave-based racial capitalism. After the emergence of the scientific revolution. In other words, after the West had constructed a dominant and dominating culture, devoted above all to extracting and accumulating: Land. Power. Wealth. All of this conquest and extraction justified by patriarchy, white supremacy, an arrogated license to conquer or kill the infidel. And, eventually, by scriptural passages that seemed to give humans ownership of the natural world. ( The Age of Dominion by John Biewen)

So it comes back to tires, and back to plastics. And, in that summer issue is an interview of Handmaid Tale’s Atwood. Of course, we get the masking, and we get those concepts of what woke is, and, then, the fragile generation, and while I like Solnit on many levels, we do get into the LGBTQ stuff, and see things that the USA will be non-white majority in two decades, and somehow the world will be good. I can’t believe Solnit has to bring in Putin, and alas, these are captured conversations.

It is so-so much more complicated than these dichotomies, and so sad that Solnit and Atwood equate their belief system to their understanding or misunderstanding of USSR and Soviet Union and Russia. Amazing. Oh well, some of the good with the bad. Here you go.

“One word: plastics.”